re: Portable Spellchecker Interface Library

["Michael D. Crawford" <crawford goingware com>]

Please have a look at:

http://www.wordservices.org

Word Services works on the MacOS and BeOS; I just joined the gnome list 
because I'd like to bring Word Services to XWindows.

On the Mac, the communication is done using Apple Events and the Apple 
Object Model.  On the BeOS, it uses BMessages and the BeOS scripting 
API.  On XWindows, I'm looking at using CORBA, so that it should be very 
easy for a GTK+ application to use Word Services and not too hard for 
any other application to use it.

Word Services allows any application to link to a speller, grammar 
checker or other text service.  It is a public protocol; no license fee 
or nondisclosure is required to use it.

Free sample source is provided in the Word Services SDK, which is 
available from the web site.

It's been in use since 1992 on the Mac, and for a couple years on the 
BeOS, and works quite well.  A lot of thought and effort has gone into 
its development.

I think it's important we should work together so that anything 
developed for Unix can take advantage of what has gone before - I've got 
years of experience in working on this kind of thing that you can draw 
on.

Note that Word Services isn't just for spellchecking.  It's for any 
operation on text where you retrieve text from a document, do something 
with the text in a GUI (optionally) and optionally put changed text 
back.  It supports highlighting erroneous text in the original document 
so the spellchecking app shows the speller dialog and the original app 
show the bad words.

Note that the spellchecker is a separate application and there is no API 
linking involved.  End users can plug in new service after you're done 
writing your application without you writing any new code.

Mike Crawford
GoingWare - Expert Software Development and Consulting
http://www.goingware.com
crawford@goingware.com